“Calls in Thailand” Retires June 23, 2005
Posted by Martin in : Business , trackbackIt is very easy in Bangkok for a westerner to stagnate and eventually to ferment. What I mean by this is that I don’t actually have to work again, learn anything new, expand my mind or keep up to date with news . I’m nearly 26 and the residual income I generate from my United World Telecom looks after me well enough here for me to survive pretty well without needing a job. I could just lie on my sofa and sleep 24-7 if I wanted to.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a long way from being the guy at the school reunion with the Rolls Royce and butler in tow but with the low cost of living here life is pretty relaxed.
Living on my own, it’s sometimes an effort to do work which really isn’t essential and may not benefit me directly for a long time (if ever). I’m a pretty self-motivated person but even so, I’ve had 2 consecutively lethargic days.
I discovered yesterday that my enviable status of not paying tax anywhere is not so enviable when I get myself constantly rejected for debt consolidation loans in the UK. As somebody with ambition it’s essential to move forward here, my finances are almost exactly what they were 14 months ago when I promised myself I’d make an effort to clear some debts from my credit cards and family.
Contrary to the fact I’ve not detailed it on this site much I have actually been extremely busy building up some small but residual revenue sources. I’m also taking a survival-of-the-fittest mentality with my websites and I’m closing or retiring some which I consider the techno-equivalent of throwing my parents into a nursing home.
First to be led away in a wheelchair is my faithful Calls in Thailand Site.
Calls in Thailand was my first professional website. Before then I’d crudely hosted some telecom information on my Truepot website. Calls in Thailand began at the same time as I began working with United World Telecom and I invested the small revenues I’d been making to pay an experienced company to build the site.
I contracted The Business Developers, a Canadian partnership of Dave, the coordinator and his wife Tanya the designer. The experience taught me a lot. I learnt about content management systems from Dave, and got a lot of really credible information from Abiyanto – a designer and programmer who Dave had contracted, fought with (and ultimately not paid). Abiyanto and I co-developed the cost-calculator on the site which is still an incredibly impressive piece of coding 2 years later – being able to compare 3 different telecom systems of 30 companies in 2 currencies from and to 500 countries and be able to be hosted in a minimized version on affiliate websites with customized results pages.
The relationship between me and The Business Developers did not end well, and I perhaps should have anticipated it. Despite great feedback on the website I found them on Dave and Tanya posed in medieval fancy dress for their website publicity photos. Whilst undoubtedly a unique and original image, the heavy armament Dave wore and his body positioning relative to his wife blurred their business image – making themselves look like fetish freaks than credible people whom I’d entrust my entire investment to. I was not very inspired by Tanya’s insistence of calling me ‘hunny’ or ‘hun’ during formal business communications either.
The project over-ran by 100%, taking about 4 months rather than 2. Once the site launched Dave closed it down in an effort to get money from me which I was not obliged to pay for another 2 weeks. This was at a time when his wife apparently had walked out on him and he had severe money worries. I paid him early, changed the password on the site leaving it slightly incomplete but safe from such a lunatic.
We got going eventually and brought in a lot of success. The site was designed to offer advice to people in Thailand about how they could save money on international phone calls. We launched about January 2003. We couldn’t sell phone services directly because in Thailand this is highly illegal therefore we padded our sales literature and products around articles about the Thai telephone services.
At the time United World Telecom was a very cheap service and by developing an affiliate program it did not take us long to really begin getting known. We had banners on all the main Thailand websites and went from making $15 of commission in January to $1500 in September by promoting only United World Telecom. I still worked as an English teacher so my income was pretty healthy by the end of the year.
In July 2003 I partnered with Chris to sell VoIP calling cards. We branded it as “The Cheap Charlie Card” Chris provided the (illegal) telecom hardware and infrastructure, I marketed his service via my site and we had joint access to his merchant account to accept credit cards. Business boomed and life was easy. I was making credible business connections and things ran smoothly until January 2004.
In February I noticed a problem with Chris’s merchant account. We’d had a week whereby Cheap-Charlie was not working because Chris had been stopped by the Thai telecom company. Despite Chris’s assurance that he was in control of the situation, I began to get worried. He’d changed the password on our merchant account and I suspected that he was about to close up and run. It took a lot of smooth talking to convince the merchant account to reset the password for me a complete stranger; with no official connection to the account - and I was astounded that their security was so lax. Just in time I managed to issue refunds to all of our credit-card clients before Chris fled Thailand to evade prosecution.
Chris fleeing the country left me with a few hundred customers and affiliates who had paid me in cash. The amount owed was consistent with about 8 months of full-time teaching income but I gradually paid them all back in full or switched them to United World Telecom in compensation.
Life eventually got back to normal although life was stressful for sure. I’d discussed with United World Telecom a way of providing accounts for small pre-paid clients who could open account with me for 500 baht ($12.50). I worked damn hard administering accounts manually and building my client based from about 80 to 400 in a 7 month period. It took all my time but my commissions increased too to over $3000 a month.
Things took a tumble in mid 2004 when without any warning at all the Thai Government slashed their overseas telecom rates in order to prevent people like me making any money. I lost about 300 clients to the CAT’s (Communication Authority of Thailand) phone card which was not only better quality but much cheaper, especially when calling to or from cellphones. The CAT used it’s monopoly to blast every competitor out of the market – ironically forcing blackmarket operators to use even cheaper VoIP networks which was ultimately what the CAT was trying to prevent.
This was Calls in Thailand’s lowest time. Customers telephoned me apologetic that they were no longer giving business to me as I had made solid friendships with many loyal customers. What kept me from giving up at this point was two thoughts:
• The idea that the harder things became for me, the less lieky I’d face competition
• My belief that if business were meant to be easy then I’d get no satisfaction years later after I’d ridden the storm.
I knew it was time to put my eggs in more baskets and basically let Calls in Thailand sit in the wings whilst I developed my United World Telecom site which would be marketed worldwide. Abiyanto – the programmer for the rates calculator vanished about this time, without fixing a bug in his work – leaving me unable to update the rates on the calculator. I sent out a few mailings and perhaps twice made some changes to the site but I ran it without enthusiasm.
Last month I made some big changes. Abiyanto returned, completely oblivious to the trouble he’d caused and he semi-updated the cost calculator. I have added VoIP services to the site now and direct all the enquiries to Tom – an American man in Thailand who pays me a commission on referrals. I’ve installed Google Adsense on the site which brought in $40 in the last month and I am going to leave it running itself. It may bring in a bit of money from the VoIP referrals, it should still make money from Adsense and a few hundred baht for other referral income so I’m happy that I no longer need to think about it.
Tom believes that he may know of a buyer for the site and encouraged me to compile a report about it. I’ll leave you with some pretty impressive statistics in respect of the good days we’ve had. I don’t really expect a sale of the site but whilst it’s bringing in something it can justify it’s hosting fee.
• Over $75,000 of revenue generated for Cheap-Charlie Calling Card between August 03 and Feb 04
• Over $194,595.77 of revenue generated for United World Telecom
• Over $10,000 of revenue generated for Clarity Calls between June 04 and June 05
• 26,809 baht (approx $655) of revenue for ThaiTelephone since July 04.
• Predicted estimate for Google Adsense Revenue is $550 p.a.
• We have a double opt-in mailing list of ~ 1,500 clients
And we have got some incredibly impressive search engine positions in Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Goodbye Calls in Thailand, I will visit you soon, but probably only to empty your bank accounts.
I have two completely new sites in development to invest my time in now which I’ll detail soon.
Comments»
Please can you inform me of the laws in sell VOIP serves or where I can look for updates on the law concerning VOIP.